02/20/2015

In the past three days both Barack Obama and John Kerry have published op/eds about their foreign policy in the Middle East under the guise of writing about violent extremism, as if it’s the violent extremism of, say, Green parties that’s the problem . As can be expected from op/eds from people in their positions, they said little and meant even less.

If I were an optimist, I would praise the international division of labor as being a civilizing force that unites all of mankind into peaceful cooperation, but I’m not and so I won’t. Doing so, anyways would be, as Arnold Kling points out at AskBlog, giving into wishful libertarian thinking.

When I think of peace in the middle east Edmund Burke’s line from Letters on a Regicide Peace that "men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites" quickly comes to mind. Like Mr. Kling, I tend to favor the conservative civilization versus barbarism lens when it comes to the institutions of the Middle East. I don’t know how valid institutional analysis will be to regions like Syria in prescribing good institutions because I don’t know if those institutions would even have legitimacy.

Herein lie the problem about Mssrs. Kerry and Obama singing the praise of communities organizing around peace in their op/eds: Communities in Syria and Iraq aren’t necessarily going to be pulling together towards peace. Many will be pulling together to help support the Islamic State assert its territorial claims in the region. It really all comes down to culture and whether local cultures can even support civilly liberal societies. Those who put faith in Arab Spring underestimated how much good institutions are contingent on culture if they are to emerge.

A passage from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is well worth quoting on this point: "Manners are of more importance than laws. The law can touch us here and there, now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation like that of the air we breathe in."

If I were to give advice to a Middle Easterner wanting prosperity, I would recommend that he, but especially she, look elsewhere. Maybe Europe, but most likely the United States. In a sense, I write off the entire region as a failed state. ISIL has grown to the point where peace-loving Middle Easterners have to take up arms against it. Patriotic duty summons Kurds and the Shia population in Iraq to arms.

That’s not to say that Middle Easterners are evil and vicious people. I think that they may be just as virtuous as Westerners. Plus, I think that a century of horrendous foreign policy from Paris, London, Washington DC and Moscow have all ensured that at least this generation of Middle Eastern states will be eventually sorted into the ‘having failed category.’ That Iraq, for instance, would eventually collapse to sectarian violence was a matter of time. Nevertheless, I think that their culture lacks the regard for liberalism and bourgeois dignity necessary to really give

The country I’d be most optimistic about (not counting Israel, since it really isn’t culturally apart of the Middle East) would probably be Iran. Persia has had a thriving secular culture for centuries before the 1979 revolution, evidenced by the fact that wine continued to have been produced until the Ayatollahs put a stop to it. Wine continues to be sold in volume on the black market there today. Even women's hairstyles of the last one hundred years reflected a growth of Western culture in Iran that was suddenly put to a halt with the formation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, though the same could be said of the same thing throughout the Muslim world at the period. Unfortunately, the foreign policy of Western countries are doing their best to isolate the nation. In doing so, however much Western nations may be talking the fight against Islamic terrorism, they push opinion there ever more behind the Ayatollahs and their Islamic Republic.

10/11/2014

Like so many political philosophers, Michael Huemer fails to consider that all political authority occurs within a cultural context. Political authority isn't something that is created out of a void, nor is it something that people sit around and agree to; rather, political authority — the actual political authority that we are all witness to on a daily basis — evolves across history driven by processes so complicated even Francis Fukuyama's two massive volumes on the subject only do so much justice explaining.

Political authority cannot be removed from the context in which it is exercised. Nevertheless, Mr. Huemer divorces his remarks from any historical context by the repeated use of the word 'agent' whereas a proper noun would've been more fitting. One cannot understand Maximilien de Robespierre's authority in launching the Reign of Terror without understanding the context in which Robespierre's commands were carried out just as one cannot understand the legitimacy of Caesar's assassins without almost drowning in the historical detail of the end of the Roman Republic. They were all political decisions made whose decision makers, be they Robespierre or Brutus, thought that their actions carried along with them a just demand for obedience. Whether that was actually the case, though, cannot be examined from a purely formal point of view because obedience necessarily involves material considerations: Who is giving the command? What are they commanding?

Mr. Huemer mistakenly treats what he calls "the problem of political authority" from the point of view of everybody in society as equals, yet any historical point of view will recognize that certain people have the authority to commit acts that would have been viewed as unquestionably reprehensible if done by another. It did matter that Brutus and a band of senators, rather than Ioannes Doeus and his friends, stabbed Caesar to death. What separates an act of tyrannicide from an act of murder can actually just be the context.

Consequently Mr. Huemer's problem of political authority is only a problem because it doesn't open its eyes to the political reality that not everyone is equal in society. The state's decision makers can extract money from its subjects and not have it called theft because the state has a conventional authority to do such things whereas a private citizen does not have such an authority. Yes, the authority is conventional, but as Edmund Burke remarked in Reflections on the Revolution in France:

If society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executive power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much as suppose its existence?

And yet, that's exactly what Mr. Huemer is assuming: Political authority without the social context that provide the causes of that authority. It's just a nonsensical way of actually understanding human society (and I hope that political philosophy actually aims to understand human society rather than build castles in the sky). It is an ancient principle that to understand something, we must understand its causes, and the same is true with political authority. To treat of political authority without treating of the conventions which give it force, as Mr. Huemer does, is simply the abuse of any metaphysical doctrine of right.

Perhaps those conventions which motivate political legitimacy are just bestial. Perhaps human society, by its very nature, isn't just, and isn't worthy of our better nature. St. Augustine came close to that statement when he compared Rome to a band of thieves in The City of God. St. Augustine recognized, though, that the vicious conventions, if I may speak of conventions as 'vicious', were a product of this world, and that to expect them to change for the better was naïve. Instead, St. Augustine argued that we should fix our eyes onto Heaven and care not for the political rubble around us.

Mr. Huemer offers no such consideration. If he wants to condemn modern human society — keeping in mind that the nation-state is part-and-parcel of our commercial society — as unbefitting to the human soul, then he is free to do so, but I doubt he'll follow St. Augustine's exhortation that the only society that matters is a spiritual one, unsoiled by the sordid realities of Homo sapiens politics.

10/04/2014

I’ve never been that much of a fan of James Buchanan nor have I shared the enthusiasm for public-choice theory among those who I would otherwise be in sympathy with on matters of politics. An article published years ago in The Independent Review by Geoffrey Brennan and Michael) Munger, titled “The Soul of James Buchanan” (I can't get the link to The Independent Review piece to work, captures many of the areas where I further disagree with Buchanan.

Whereas Buchanan is a social-contract theorist who is optimistic about the ability of human reason to craft rules to solve the problems generated by social existence, I utterly reject social-contract theory, and believe that whatever rules humanity has are necessarily generated by history. We both may be skeptics, but we are at odds about what we are skeptical about. Whereas, Buchanan is skeptical about the ability of history to generate rules well suited to a liberal society, I’m a skeptic about reason’s ability to substantially improve upon the rules that history has bestowed to us.

I find it hard to get behind James Buchanan’s research program because I simply do not find any worth in social-contract theory. I think social-contract theory is incredibly dangerous to sound thought about the nature of society. No state is the product of a social contract, and social-contract theory can blind us to understanding what the real nature of each state is. Each state is the product of its history — which involve a myriad of experiences, from conquest to commerce to rules determining inheritance— and so our understanding of what each state is should take into consideration that they are the products of historical evolution rather than an agreement hashed out among its members.

Rather than guiding our understanding of each state as a creature embedded in its own particular history, social-contract theory tempts us to replace an understanding with what we think the state should be. Buchanan fully embraces that danger when he writes, with Gordon Tullock, in the introduction of The Calculus of Consent that “We are not directly interested in what the State or a State actually is, but propose to define quite specifically… what we think a State ought to be” (Liberty Fund: 1999, 3). However, if we do not understand what the nature of the state actually is, then how can we delude ourselves into thinking we can improve upon it?

As one would figure from the title The Calculus of Consent, consent plays a massive role in Buchanan’s research program. As Brennan and Munger write: “His notion of consent was surprisingly nearly literal. He really meant consent, unanimous consent, giving each person a veto over any alterations to the status quo“ (p. 5). Yet, if politics has a point — a final cause, so to speak — it isn’t to generate consensus, it’s to generate acquiescence.

People in politics aren’t trying to generate agreement so much as silence. A successful policy is one that people don’t protest. The successful states that we see around us aren’t the result of consent, but a result of people being willing to put up with what the state is doing. For instance, it would be absurd to say that contemporary Republicans have consented to the Affordable Care Act. They certainly haven’t; nevertheless, aren’t going up in arms about it, and have instead acquiesced to fighting it through politics. The rules of the game that dictate how Democrats and Republicans fight over the Affordable Care Act haven’t been decided in a social contract, but instead are part of the inherited institutions that all Americans live their lives surrounded by.

Republican voters may also have been very unhappy when Barack Obama was reelected in 2012; however, they are willing to acquiesce to his presidency, and to look forward, they hope, to having their own president in office in 2016. That acquiescence is what unsuccessful states lack. Egypt’s state failed in 2011 when its citizens were no longer willing to acquiesce to Hosni Mubarak’s rule. Consent just has no place in that picture, and so there’s no good reason to talk about it. Instead, we should be talking about acquiesence, and the reasons why people get along in society without actual consent, which they certainly manage to do, as American politics, however partisan it may be, gives witness to. Social-contract theory simply misses the train on that very important point.

Moreover, Buchanan rejected the very process of descent with modification that makes the evolution of rules in society possible. As Brennan and Munger write: “He believed that people ought to craft for themselves the rules of the socio-eco-politico game by which they were to interact” (p. 7). Without the inheritance of rules, there cannot be the evolution of rules. The evolution of any entity is the consequence of the different variations it has accumulated across generations. If any entity is to evolve, then it must descend with modification, and that descent must involve some form of heredity.

If rules are created by each generation anew for the designs of that generation, then they don’t evolve; rather, they are created anew each generation. Brennan and Munger write about how Buchanan rejected that traditions had any legitimacy: “He rejected completely the Burkean conservatism that required deference to tradition and symbols of merit that were static and inherited” (p. 7). Without a modicum of deference to inherited rules, then human society cannot function. Inherited rules provide the focal points by which societies cohere. To deny their legitimacy is to deny the very fabric of society.

The liberal society cannot be divorced from its history. Edmund Burke appreciated that fact in Reflections on the Revolution in France, yet Brennan and Munger position Burke as a conservative opposite of Buchanan's classical liberalism, even though many classical liberals, such as Lord Acton, were admirers of Burke. Though the two may want to divorce the virtue of hope from the virtue of faith in “The Soul of James Buchanan?”, they are surprisingly ignorant of the fact that the virtue of hope springs from the virtue of faith. The theological virtues are united. We can have hope because of our faith. Without faith, there is no foundation for hope. To go on hoping without a sound foundation of faith isn’t a virtue, but a vice.

The reason why we can have hope for a liberal civilization is that we have faith that the civilization’s rules, which have evolved in historical processes that cannot be flattened out to human craftsmanship, shall be able to curb the ambitions of tyrants, and to guide people in peaceful coexistence. David Hume got to the faith we should have in liberal institutions when he wrote in his essay, “That politics may be reduced to a science”: “Is our constitution so excellent? Then a change of ministry can be no such dreadful event; since it is essential to such a constitution, in every ministry, both to preserve itself from violation, and to prevent all enormities in the administration.”

07/20/2014

From Antiphon’s On Truth as quoted in the introduction of Thucydides’ The War of the Peloponnesians and the Athenians (edited by Jeremy Myrott):

Justice, therefore, consists in not violating the customary laws of the city in which one is a citizen. So a person takes most advantage for himself from ‘justice’ if he respects the important of the laws when witnesses are present, but follows nature in their absence. For the requirements of the law are discretionary but the requirements of nature are necessary; and the requirements of the law are by agreement and not natural, whereas the requirements of nature are natural and not by agreement.

From Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France:

If civil society be the offspring of convention, that convention must be its law. That convention must limit and modify all the descriptions of constitution which are formed under it. Every sort of legislative, judicial, or executory power are its creatures. They can have no being in any other state of things; and how can any man claim, under the conventions of civil society, rights which do not so much suppose its existence? Rights which are absolutely repugnant to it?

The greatest political superstition of the modern era is the belief that laws are the creations of reason rather than of, as G.K. Chesterton called it, the democracy of the dead. Just as the creationist needs to postulate the existence of a creator transcendent to the world in order to make sense of its creative processes, so too does the modernist need to postulate the existence of minds transcendent to society in order to explain law. Both are happy stories about how the world isn’t run by chance or folly, but by intelligent beings able to think through what they’ve created, and both are wrong superstitions.

Just as species are the haphazard creations of natural selection, so too are laws the product of selective forces operating beyond the understanding of the human mind. Furthermore, just like species, laws lack any special τέλος. It is very easy to think that a law against murder as existing to prevent people from murdering one another, but that’s like saying that a large ground finch has a robust beak for cracking nuts.

It’s a statement which assumes the existence of a teleological goal which isn’t really there. Both statements don’t do much harm at the superficial level; however, as one examines the phenomena closer in depth, the assumption of teleology will be misleading. Just like the large ground finch’s beak, laws against killing have come about because they provide selective benefits to the societies that harbor those laws, which brings us to a very important point about law: that it’s focal.

Edmund Burke recognizes that when he talks about the conventional nature of society. The conventions are the focal standards of behavior which people observe, and their observation of those conventions creates a specific type of society depending on the constitution of that given convention. Laws are then the most sacred of those conventions which have worked their way into the very fabric of a society through generations facing the particular problems they are faced with, hence the democracy of the dead part. There is a democracy to tradition; unlike voting for representatives, though, tradition’s democracy demands much more of its voters than simply arriving to the booths, it demands people to vote for traditions by adopting ways of life.

Those ways of life eventually become focal for people coordinating their behavior with one another. In essence, laws are nothing but long-standing customs. They are not, as the moderns would have us believe, the product of a spiritual force - reason, little more than a ghost in the machine - otherwise unconnected to the particular historical circumstances each society is faced with.

06/03/2014

All men that are ruined, are ruined on the side of their natural propensity.

-Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace

In a recent episode of EconTalk, “Yuval Levin on Burke, Paine, and the Great Debate,” Russ Roberts talks to Levin on how the debate between Burke and Paine is a useful perspective to look at the left/right divide in politics. Whereas Paine emphasized the possibilities of human achievement if man were to be liberated from the political and cultural constraints around him, Burke emphasized how those political and cultural constraints made the human achievements worth celebrating possible.

Paine’s optimistic portrayal of man’s ability to make a world for himself was echoed in Common Sense when he wrote: “We have every opportunity and every encouragement before us, to form the noblest purest constitution on the face of the earth. We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” Burke’s attitude is summarized in the following passage from Reflections on the Revolution in France: “I cannot conceive how any man can have brought himself to that pitch of presumption, to consider his country as nothing but carte blanche, upon which he may scribble whatever he pleases… but a good patriot, and a true politician, always considers how to make the most of the existing material of his country.” The two could be almost no more opposed about how they think about how the constraints upon human beings have influenced human prosperity.

Myself, I have great enthusiasm for Burke. Nevertheless, I don’t think that the debate between Burke and Pain, or even just Burke’s critique of Enlightenment thought, is as important as thinking about the proper way to look at classical liberalism. Burke is unfairly branded as a conservative critic of liberalism, but really he is one of its staunchest defenders against the excesses of Enlightenment thought. Burke recognized the important of historical context to the flowering of liberty and we should not brand him as a conservative merely for that fact. Reflections on the Revolution in France was one of the books that converted me away from a Rothbardian perspective on politics. Although Murray Rothbard is excellent in how we sets up his definition of liberty and what follows from that definition, he is much less excellent in describing instances of liberty in the actual world.

In his Second Speech on Coniliation with the Colonies,” Burke expressed the necessary historical context of liberalism when he wrote that “Abstract liberty, like other mere abstractions, does not exist. Liberty inheres in some sensible object; and every nation has formed to itself some favourite point, which by way of eminence becomes the criterion of their happiness.” When talking about the colonists’ desire for freedom, he didn’t do it from the point of view of Enlightenment though, as Paine had done in Common Sense; instead, he discussed them as the descendants of Englishmen desiring the freedom which Englishmen had become accustomed for. Burke’s dislike for purely abstract statements is emphasized in the second letter of his Letters on a Regicide Peace, when he wrote about the “hocus-pocus of abstraction.”

Burke was careful in positioning himself as an opponent of the arbitrary construction of liberty. He argued that the fulfillment of liberal desires weren’t to be found in destroying what came before and erecting a new nation from the ashes, but in taking what was best from a nation’s past and using that as the basis for the future.

When comparing the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to the French Revolution then occurring, Burke differentiated the ideals of the Glorious Revolution with that of the French, writing: “The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.” For Burke, the only sustainable liberal civilization was one that had developed liberal traditions over a long period of time. Whereas Burke pointed to Magna Carta, and English common law as evidence for the historical origin of English liberty, he pointed to the excessively metaphysical characteristics of the Rights on Man as evidence that the French Revolution was an exercise in hocus-pocus liberalism.

Edmund Burke shall always be a challenging figure for some because of how he emphasized that we are all tied to the histories of our nations and how he emphasized that man is a fallen creature who succeeds largely because of the constraints put on his desires by tradition. Whereas other Enlightenment figures, like Thomas Paine, presented an optimistic view of humanity which held that humanity could achieve great things if only the chains of the past were broken asunder, Burke took the line that the great things that humanity has done is because of our history, our traditions and sources of authority, not in spite of them.

Since he was critical of French Enlightenment thought, Burke has been viewed to be a conservative critic of the Enlightenment perspective on politics, but that judgment is faulty because Burke is no conservative. In the Reflections, Burke went as far to say that a nation that couldn’t change had no means of sustaining itself. In both the Reflections and his impeachment speeches, Burke doesn’t look at tradition as something monolithic and as something sacred per se; instead, Burke wrote about how tradition is necessary for the organization of human society and how good traditions can be used to promote good outcomes. The Glorious Revolution, because it built upon what was already good in the English traditions of common law, representative government, and Magna Carta in order to promote liberty whereas the French Revolution tore down the monarch and replaced it with metaphysical hocus pocus. Even though Burke was critical of the Enlightenment, he was still a champion of liberty. Moreover, he was champion of liberty within its proper historical perspective.

Burke is and ever shall be one of the most eloquent defenders of a liberal civilization. He challenges us to think about the liberal civilization within the context of human events rather than metaphysical doctrines. Thomas Paine may teach us much about recognizing the form of liberty, but he falls prey victim to what Hayek called constructivist rationalism: An overconfidence is the constructive capabilities of reason based on the delusion that all the necessary facts to construct a new order are available. Pain was wrong about the course that the French Revolution would take. It wasn’t a flowering of American-style liberty in Europe, but rather a movement that would eventually cannibalize itself.

Burke can help us understand how liberty has evolved, and how the liberal civilization cannot simply be constructed, but must instead be grown. Unlike Paine, he understood that a liberal civilization is grown, not constructed. It is a product of a peculiar historical context rather than a product of the brilliance of the human mind.

01/22/2014

In an article about Burke's views on custom and about John Stuart Mill as the "the midwife of modern liberalism," Patrick J. Deneen has some wise words about Burke's philosophy:

At one time Americans did not need Burke because we were practical Burkeans; but today we need Burke because we no longer have Custom. Sadly, however, once you need to draft Burke into the battle, you have probably already lost the war.

10/22/2012

You
will observe, that from Magna Charta to the Declaration of Right, it
has been the uniform policy of our constitution to claim and assert
our liberties, as an entailed inheritance derived
to us from our forefathers, and to be transmitted to our posterity;
as an estate specifically belonging to the people of this kingdom
without any reference whatever to any more general or prior right. By
this means our constitution preserves an unity so great a diversity
of its parts. We have an inheritable crown; an inheritable peerage;
and an house of commons and a people inheriting privileges,
franchises, and liberties, from a long line of ancestors.

This policy appears top me to be the result of profound reflection;
or rather the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom
without reflection, and above it. A spirit of innovation is generally
the result of a selfish temper and confined views. People will not
look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their
ancestors. Besides, the people of England well know, that the idea of
inheritance furnishes a sure principle of conservation, and a sure
principle of transmission; without an all excluding a principle of
improvement. It leaves acquisition free; but it secures what it
acquires. Whatever advantages are obtained by a state proceeding on
these maxims, are locked fast as in a sort of family settlement;
grasped in a kind of mortmain for ever. By a constitutional policy,
working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit
our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we
transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the
goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, are handed down, to us and
from us, in the same course and order.

Each generation
only has so long on this earth. People come and go. Officials of the
government will only be in power for so long and even Sir Humphrey's
time in office will eventually come to a close. What remain are
institutions. Institutions transcend the actions of single human
beings and survive through the ages as new people come in to fill the
roles that are left as others leave. As the great Bard once wrote,
“all the world's a stage/ and all the men and women merely
players”; what matters to the people around us is less who we are
than what we do and what role we decide to fill in society.
Institutions provide the roles that people decide to play in their
relation to others in society at large, and thus they help determine
the course of human history.

The institutions
that bind us are not creations of the human intellect. It may
certainly be the case that they are the product of human action, but
what single human mind designed the British monarchy? None and none
could have. The British monarchy, like so many other institutions, is
a product of a long line of people acting within it in reaction to a
large variety of events and problems. Even the American Constitution
was not written with the ideas of one human person, but was designed
over the course of months in a gathering of many of the most talented
lawyers in America at that time. More importantly, it was largely
constituted by general rules of conduct that were already accepted as
laws, important concepts like representative government and due
process had centuries of previous history before being incorporated
into the Constitution.

Only the worst look
at society as a carte blanche upon which they can create their own
vision of society. And only those who have drunken deep from the
waters of the fatal conceit that man's mind can actually truly
comprehend all the ties that hold society together think that it is
possible for there even to be a coherent vision of society to write
upon that blank check. The only sound political perspective,
especially for actual governance, is one that consciously accepts the
important of the institutions that we have inherited as the important
engines of human affairs and that lets those institutions, with
certainly marginal changes around the edges, set the course of state.